Behind Her Eyes

by Sarah Pinborough

[pamela]

Behind Her Eyes was very much a book that didn't know quite what it wanted to be. It markets itself as a crime/domestic thriller and glosses over its strong paranormal/horror elements. Because it tries to straddle that line, the book manages to be a poor example of both and really suffers for it.

The thing that draws most people in with Behind Her Eyes is the promise of an amazing, unguessable twist ending. There are, in fact, two twists in the book. The first is obvious if you've been paying attention. The second twist is exactly the same as the first twist, but FUCKING STUPID! Imagine if you were reading Little Red Riding Hood, and instead of the ending it has, it just ended with the words, "and Grandma was an alien," you'll have a good impression of what it was like to get to the end of this book. The twist was unguessable because the narrative had in no way developed toward it along the way. It was lazy sensationalism, and I was absolutely not here for it.

There were certainly moments when Behind Her Eyes gripped me, but on the whole, it was a rather pedestrian story about moronic protagonists with whom I felt no connection. The pace was plodding, and I found myself skipping ahead in a few sections as it got boring. The character motivations were barely explored at all, and because of that, everything just seemed a bit contrived and silly. There are about a million ways that these situations would have played out differently if normal people had been in them without the desperate need to create plot drama.

I started watching the Netflix dramatisation of Behind Her Eyes, which is what made me pick up the book. The show does a much better job of making the characters likeable and creating a sense of drama than the book does, which is really saying something. If you like this style of domestic drama, then it might be worth giving it a go, but overall I feel Pinborough would have been better served deciding on the type of book she wanted to write and commit to the genre. This weird mishmash just didn't work. While other writers have managed to toe that line to great effect (Phil Rickman and John Connolly are perfect examples of this), Pinborough simply didn't do enough worldbuilding or character development to make her plot palatable.